Sectional doors are used in a wide variety of industrial, commercial and private settings. A common example of a sectional door is a conventional garage door. Sectional doors typically comprise a series of panels hinged together to form the door, and the door is movable between a range of doorway-blocking positions, in which one or several of the panels extend across the doorway opening, and unblocking positions. A sectional door is most commonly stored in a so-called “overhead” configuration. In such a configuration, a guide track is disposed on either side of the doorway, with one leg (adjacent to the doorway opening) extending vertically along the doorway, and the second leg (projecting back from the doorway opening) disposed above and behind the doorway (i.e., “overhead”). A curved track section joins the two legs. Associated with the panels making up the door are a series of rollers, which are received within and guided by the tracks to guide the panels and thus the door between its blocking and unblocking positions. Sectional doors may also be stored in a vertical orientation directly above the doorway opening. That is they may have straight tracks and be movable in a continuous plane between doorway-blocking and doorway opening positions. Typically, the panels comprising such a sectional door are formed of either metals, wood, or composite structures either glued or riveted together.
The panels which form a sectional door are commonly coupled to each other by means of hinges disposed between adjacent panels. In overhead storing doors, these hinges are required to allow the panels to pivot with respect to each other so that successive panels can change their orientation from the vertical to the horizontal, or vice versa, as they move either toward or away from the overhead, stored position. While these hinges are needed for proper door activation, they also have disadvantages. For example, the hinges create spaces or gaps between successive panels the sizes of which change as the door travels, and which may thus become pinch points. While the size of these gaps is typically largest when the two successive panels are adjacent the curved portion of the track, they may be present for other orientations of the door, particularly when the door is near the fully closed position. As the door moves to the fully closed position, the accumulated weight of the door will compress any gaps between successive panels, pinching them together. Such a pinching action may be a hazard either to personnel or to valuable cargo in the vicinity of the door. The gaps between panels also allow air to leak past the door. In refrigerated or other temperature-controlled warehouses or other industrial installations, the leakage through these gaps may be substantial and thus costly. Finally, sectional doors in an industrial environment will be subjected to impacts—typically by fork trucks or other material handling equipment, or by the load which they are carrying. Accordingly, damage may result. If a panel is damaged, the hinges associated with that panel must all be removed and possibly replaced. Further, the panel must then be removed and replaced and the associated hinges re-attached. Such a repair operation may be both time-consuming and costly.